All Too Fitting

Want to see perfection? It's available for twelve more days on Amazon Prime. Now streaming is 1961's The Misfits, one of the most perfect movies ever made. Marilyn Monroe stars in a movie written by her husband, the great playwright Arthur Miller. And it's kind of a movie about her as well as more generally about people adrift in a world that has no place for them.

It's funny to say that about Monroe or her character, Roslyn. If anyone has a place in this world, surely it's Marilyn Monroe whose image even to-day, even here in Japan, is instantly recognisable. But Arthur Miller and director John Huston's portrait of a woman increasingly desperate to make connexions with men even as she's surrounded by men who adore her is keen as a razor.

Somewhere between the fantasy she can't live up to and her own need for affection is a place of complete psychological isolation. One suspects Monroe knew a lot of guys like Eli Wallach's character, Guido, whose fervour is all about his needs. "Give me a reason," he says, like the Portishead lyric, and that's when she realises the former bomber could "blow up the world" and all he'd be sorry for was himself. How far would Marilyn have to get with a guy before she realised all of his demonstrations of love were entirely selfish? It would be hard enough for most people in her shoes, it was probably twenty times harder in a Hollywood filled with narcissists.

Clark Gable's character, Gay, is the best guy for her, the dream man that probably never existed. "How do you just live?" she asks him when he tells her how simple his life is as a cowboy. In the climax we find his freedom does come at a price his conscience is finally no longer willing to pay. But he'd probably always have a certain equanimity about him, a quality that allows him to tell Roslyn she's so beautiful, "It's kind of an honour," just to sit next to her. But not greedily clutch at her the way Guido does or pathetically the way Perce, Montgomery Clift's character, does.

He's another lost soul perfectly cast. But he's looking for a mother, that's clear from his introductory scene where tries to make his real mother proud of his rodeo achievement in a pathetic phone call. He's not as independent as Gay but both of them want something at that dangerous rodeo that Roslyn can't understand. She screams in despair every time Perce falls off the horse. She's always trying to patch up wounds in others that may not even exist, much to Gay's evident irritation. And finally it seems obvious that her response to her own psychological pain is to project it on others rather than try to heal it in herself. Maybe that wasn't even possible.

They keep making biopics about Marilyn Monroe but they needn't bother. Nothing's ever going to top The Misfits.